


The Loss of Youth

by fireflyeskies



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 03:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2094741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflyeskies/pseuds/fireflyeskies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Siobhan misses the old days. The days when nothing mattered and everything mattered. When they had a cause to fight for, something to stand up for, but at the same time they were all so young that they had not yet lost that happy, hopeful feeling yet. The one that made you believe that you really could change the world if only you fought hard enough for it. They were not yet jaded cynics, desperately trying to get through each day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Loss of Youth

 

Siobhan misses the old days. The days when nothing mattered and everything mattered. When they had a cause to fight for, something to stand up for, but at the same time they were all so young that they had not yet lost that happy, hopeful feeling yet. The one that made you believe that you really could change the world if only you fought hard enough for it. They were not yet jaded cynics, desperately trying to get through each day. There were no families to protect, children to worry for. No nights spent up with the bottle, licking at old wounds and covering over old scars and hoping that the world could not see how damned _hard_ they were trying to keep it all together.

It’s at times like these, when Sarah will barely even look at her and even Felix is giving the cold shoulder that Siobhan really misses the way things used to be. So she does exactly what she knows she shouldn’t. She tries to run back to those days. The bottle is not enough to rekindle that feeling that she misses so much. But Marion? Oh Marion’s enough.

Siobhan knows that in reality this woman is the enemy. She’s Dyad, and more than that she’s Dyad brass. This woman was likely involved in some of what has insofar happened to Sarah and to Kira. At the very least, she knew what her people were doing, knew that they were out to take back their property, Siobhan’s family.

But Marion is also the only thing of her past that Siobhan has. She wonders sometimes, about the sacrifices she made for Sarah and for Felix. Every friend she ever had, every lover and every root she put down in the place she called home she lost in the night they fled London. Even the last of her few remaining old friends are gone now. And by her own hand. All in the name of protecting her family.

There are no regrets. Not a single one. The sacrifices and the loss are all made worthy by those two infuriating children she’s raised up and the third, the baby girl that nobody ever expected, least of all her. She has turned her life upside down and inside out time and time again for them and she’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.

But Marion is still here. Changed of course, but then aren’t they all? She is no longer the young woman that Siobhan fell so hard for all those years ago but she’s still enough. Enough to relight that slow burning inferno inside once more. They both know that they really, really shouldn’t be doing this but it burns, and it burns _so_ good.

The family that Siobhan has fought so very hard for want nothing to do with her so she will cling to whatever she has left to convince herself that  it was all worth it.

Here in this darkened room with only the faint strains of moonlight muffled behind the curtains casting shadows across the bedroom it is so easy for Siobhan to pretend like this is the whole world. Her entire universe in this single solitary fixed moment encapsulated in these four walls. She lies flat on her back, eyes fixed to the ceiling as though she can see through it to the stars, she’s barely even aware of the woman beside her stirring into wakefulness. There’s a silent moment where she becomes aware that Marion’s awake but still and just looking at Siobhan. Trying to fathom something of what’s going on in her head from the dimly lit blankness in her expression as she studies those invisible stars.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing” Siobhan replies, the white lie so easily rolling off the tongue after so much time and practice at ignoring the guilt.

But Marion is still Marion and she always knew better than that. Getting lies past Marion never was easy, she couldn’t lie to her about anything, not then and apparently not now. She had this uncanny knack of rumbling you every time no matter how innocent the untruth may be.

“Hmm. What are you thinking about?” Marion says again rather more pointedly, finally moving and reaching out to curl one delicate hand around her jaw, forcing Siobhan to look at her.

Siobhan just rolls her eyes, she’s not even surprised anymore “Just the old days” she finally murmurs sounding so very, very tired. As though she carries the weight of the whole world upon her shoulders. A feeling she has become all too accustomed to lately.

“Oh? What has you looking so forlorn then?” Marion says, shuffling closer, gaze questioning.

“Just the way it all used to be. Used to feel” Siobhan sighs heavily, too heavily for such a serene moment in time “How it used to feel so much…easier than all this somehow”

“Really? It may have been easier for you back then dear S, but I was the one watching you go out every weekend to pick fights with riot police and set fires”

“Mmm, I never said I spent my youth doing _good_ deeds, just ones that were easier to cope with. And don’t pretend as though you weren’t right there beside me” Siobhan answers half-heartedly teasing at Marion.

True enough, much of Siobhan’s younger years were spent engaging in things that looking back perhaps she isn’t so proud of. But at least she was doing something she believed in, something to stand up for. These days her only cause is protecting her dysfunctional little family. And so far it feels as though she’s doing a pretty poor job of it.

Perhaps not all of her past actions were not always particularly ‘good’ ones but everything she ever did was backed up by an iron-clad sense of honour and a moral compass. She never did anything she didn’t believe in.

But family? Sarah and Felix and Kira? This is the one thing in her life that she knows that she _cannot_ fuck up. There is no room for regret here because there will be no second chances. Whether they know or even care that she’s trying so bloody hard to protect them, she will keep doing so anyway. In whatever ways she can. No matter the cost.

But sometimes even causes and morals and honour needs to take a rest. Find a familiar place to settle and make home. Siobhan casts around her life for something, anything and in the end she finds that she comes up with only Marion. Because while the other woman may be inextricably linked with the dangers she is shielding her people from, she was Siobhan’s before she was Dyad’s. And so she finds out, even after years and years with barely a passing thought for the other between them, she still is.

“You’re doing it again” Marion murmurs softly into the darkness breaking Siobhan’s distracted chain of thought.

“Hmm?”

“Withdrawing into your own head. You still spend far too much time with your own thoughts love”

“Maybe”

Marion frowns faintly at the exhausted tinge to Siobhan’s voice and brings her other hand up to carefully cup the other woman’s face before pulling her into a haltingly gentle kiss. She half expects Siobhan to either pull away or to reject the gentleness. Instead they stay locked like that for a moment, hardly moving and barely even breathing, the both of them breathing for the other. When they part Marion smiles a soft, surprised smile “The years must have softened you S. You’d never have let me do that when we were young” she teases.

“What are you trying to say?” Siobhan says, pretending to look mildly affronted.

“You know what I mean, you were…rougher then, more…impatient” Marion says carefully.

 “We were so young, we were all impatient. There was a lot to do” Siobhan answers evenly. They have indeed both lost that kind of eagerly impatient drive that they all used to have. They have both been mellowed by the years, it’s only that it is more apparent in Siobhan.

“But rough? No, rough I can still do” The suggestive gleam in her eye is enough to tell Marion that she really, really should have chosen her words with more care. Siobhan has clearly gained the capacity for a kind of gentility that she was hardly even capable of when she was twenty, but apparently that doesn’t mean that somewhere along the way she lost the rough edges she started with.

This kiss is nothing like the one before it, Siobhan pulls herself up and then pushes Marion back, effectively pinning her down and the differences between the two of them are starkly clear. The calm of the darkened room is burned away by hot, biting kisses, fingers wound into hair, shuddering teeth on hammering pulses and the heat of a fire lit by two people both desperately trying to melt away all their worries and fears in one another.

When the sun rises the fire is long extinguished and they are burnt out and exhausted. The sunlight washes them clean and a quiet tranquillity settles itself in the spaces between those four walls once again. Siobhan finally sleeps, peaceful and still with Marion firmly ensconced in her arms wakeful and watching.

Worrying, mostly. Marion remembers the girl she knew when she was young and in absolute unabashed awe of this girl, so different from her own sheltered life. The girl with the crooked grin and a chip on her shoulder. The one who took poor, nervous little Marion under her wing and showed her a world she’d never seen, taught her every lewd curse she knew, played her punk rock records into the wee hours of the morning and taught her how to drink like a sailor.

Marion knows what Siobhan has done to have driven her to this place as her last resort. She knows that she’s lost Sarah’s trust, again, and this time she may really have lost it for good. And yet no one could fault her as a mother, Marion knows the sacrifices Siobhan has made for Sarah time and time again with little to no thanks for it all. This is just one more sacrifice, Sarah’s trust in return for her safety. An easy choice to make for a mother perhaps. She wonders if she’d be able to do the same (she knows that she would).

Marion makes no judgements, the choices made were hard ones, but ones that cannot be taken back now, regardless of any regrets. They have both made their beds and now, now it is time to lie in them and face whatever may come.


End file.
